


Five Souls the Gods Claimed

by TempleCloud



Category: Chalion Saga - Lois McMaster Bujold, Vorkosigan Saga - Lois McMaster Bujold
Genre: Canonical Character Death, Crossover, Everyone is Dead, Gen
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2020-11-02
Updated: 2020-11-02
Packaged: 2021-03-09 08:48:14
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,023
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/27348415
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/TempleCloud/pseuds/TempleCloud
Summary: Most people around the Nexus don't believe in the gods.  But that doesn't mean the gods don't believe in them.  Written for 2nd November as an All Souls' Day fic, because Bujold's characters aren't all saints.
Comments: 24
Kudos: 57





	Five Souls the Gods Claimed

Most Barrayarans do not believe in the gods, or in an afterlife. If you’re Barrayaran, the most you can hope for is to return to being part of Barrayar: to be buried with your ancestors, and to know that your surviving family will remember you and burn death-offerings so that your soul can rest.

Or, if you never knew your father, ran away from your mother by the age of twelve, and your whole surviving family consists of a daughter who never wants to return to Barrayar ever again, at least that you will rest with _some_ family who matter to you.

Sergeant Bothari knew he was dead, of course. From where he stood, he could see his corpse lying in a crumpled heap on the friction matting. Lord Miles – Lord Vorkosigan, now, not to mention Admiral Naismith – was kneeling by it as if desperately trying to see if there was some way of reviving him. ‘No point,’ Bothari said, but the boy couldn’t hear him. Elena was throttling Elena, and he couldn’t stop it happening, couldn’t touch anything… ‘Stop that!’ he called sharply. ‘No strangling your mother!’ But they couldn’t hear him, either, and Lord Miles was breaking up the fight anyway. The living figures looked shadowy, somehow, as if they were the ghosts.

‘Well, Konstantine, are you ready to go?’ asked a new voice. Bothari spun round, ready to shoot, only he didn’t have a weapon, bloody hell, if his ghost was the memory of who he was, it ought to be _covered_ in weapons, why was a stranger addressing him by his first name when nobody ever called him that…?

The stranger’s white uniform, on the other hand, was covered in bulges that must be concealed weapons, some of them even in places Bothari himself hadn’t tried hiding weapons, even places Lord Miles hadn’t tried when he was a kid and it was part of Bothari’s job to check him for weapons before dropping him off at school. It looked about forty, with a lean, beardless face – naturally beardless, not shaved – white skin, pink eyes, and long, white, braided hair. Bothari wasn’t sure what sex it was – not man, or woman, or herm. 

Eunuch, then. With that colouring, it/he had to be a mutant, but maybe someone hadn’t wanted to kill him, but wanted to make sure he didn’t breed? Like those news reports a while back: ‘CRIPPLED WAR VETERAN CASTRATED WITH BROKEN BOTTLE IN CARAVANSERAI – MISTAKEN FOR MUTANT’. Bothari didn’t know when gangs had started getting so picky. When he was a kid – or even during the Pretendership War – anyone who was trying to survive just killed anyone who looked like a soft target, to grab their clothes and any money they might have on them. You didn’t care whether someone was a mutie or not, and you certainly didn’t piss about with anything as fiddly as castration. Except that life started looking a lot different when some of your best friends were cripples, and you needed to protect them…

‘I could take a different form, if you’d find it more disconcerting,’ said the intruder. ‘At the moment, I’m using the appearance of one of the souls in my care. A secretary-tutor, expert potion-maker, bodyguard and assassin. I think you’ll get on rather well with him.’

It was probably just another hallucination, Bothari reminded himself. He didn’t get them so often these days, as long as he took his medication, but they came back sometimes when he was tired or worried, or alone for too long. Maybe being dead brought them on, too?

‘No, I’m real,’ the figure said. ‘I’m a substition; I’m true whether you believe in me or not.’

It didn’t _feel_ like a hallucination, Bothari had to admit. His hallucinations weren’t often people he could see, anyway – mostly they were voices, chanting, _You’re evil, you’re a psychopath, even Lady Vorkosigan admits you’re a monster, you’re not fit to be allowed near a woman or a child, just kill yourself NOW…_

But when they did put on the shape of people, they didn’t _admit_ to not being real people – and they tried to look as ordinary as possible. They certainly wouldn’t decide to look like an albino eunuch with a weird hairstyle.

 _I believe that the tormented are very close to God._ A different voice – Lady Vorkosigan’s voice, a long time ago, he couldn’t remember when or where – didn’t matter. Anyway, he knew Lady Vorkosigan believed in God, even if he’d never asked exactly _what_ she believed about God. For him, it had been enough just to believe in Lady Vorkosigan, and to know that somehow, for reasons he couldn’t remember, she believed in him, Sergeant Bothari, as well.

‘You’re a god, aren’t you?’ he said, and it didn’t even feel strange to say it.

‘Well done!’ said the white figure. ‘To be precise, I am the fifth god: the god of whores and bastards and orphans; of madmen and demons and sorcerers; of disaster and murder and sudden reversals, of fruit out of season, of mutants and herms, of trickery, and “[all things counter, original, spare, strange](https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/44399/pied-beauty)”. Of course, this also means I have the job of collecting the souls that the other gods don’t want, but on this occasion, I chose _first._ ’

‘But if you decide you’d rather not go with my Stepson, I would also be glad to have you,’ added another god. This one looked like an older man, dressed in black and grey, with a look in his eyes that reminded Bothari of Admiral Vorkosigan. The mischievous glint in the white god’s eyes looked more like Lord Miles when he was just getting an idea that was going to cause trouble for everyone. ‘I am the god of fathers, and of justice. You were a caring father to Elena, as far as your understanding allowed. You were certainly a good foster-father to Miles.’

‘Aren’t you going to tell me where I have to go, sir?’ Bothari asked.

‘If there were only one option, I would. As it is, justice requires me to tell you that you have a choice. And that if you prefer, you can refuse both of us, and remain here as a ghost.’

That might not be so bad. Bothari remembered, years ago, listening to Mistress Hysopi telling Elena and Lord Miles [the story of loyal Mandryka](https://archiveofourown.org/works/227998), who refused to let even death release him from his Count’s service, but stayed on as a ghost to ride behind the Count through storm and fire and snow, and carry two swords to defend him from the foe. He remembered the children gazing up at him, eyes filled with hero-worship, and how much he had wished he could promise, ‘Yes, my lord, I’ll ride behind you through storm and fire and snow.’ But he hadn’t realised it was possible, then…

‘It’s not like in the stories,’ the grey god warned him. ‘You would be bound to the place where you died – this ship – not to Miles or Cordelia or Aral. You have already seen that you are unable to defend the living from the living. And, in time, you would forget who you were, and forget those you loved, and be left with nothing but despair and loneliness, until you finally disintegrated. I cannot recommend it. But you, and everyone else who dies, have that choice.’

Why did they keep going on about choices? Why couldn’t there just be rules? Rules made life simple, meant he didn’t have to try and decide what was the right thing to do, when he didn’t have the right sort of brain for thinking about stuff like that.

‘Believe me, it isn’t just about having the wrong sort of brain,’ said the grey god. ‘Everyone who thinks at all comes up against situations that aren’t covered by the rules they know. You’d have to be a lot more insane, to the point where concepts like right and wrong had no meaning for you at all, not to worry about it. Do you think Admiral Vorkosigan didn’t agonise over whether the decisions he made as Lord Regent were the right thing to do? Do you think he didn’t feel every bit as guilty about his actions in the Escobar War as you did about yours?

‘But before we go any further,’ the grey god went on, ‘I should restore your memory, if you’ll let me. Admittedly, miracles of healing are usually my Wife’s department, but I can hardly expect you to decide where you belong, when you don’t have the relevant information. May I?’

This was going to hurt, he knew. But the grey god was right: he needed to know what had happened, not just the few snapshots of memory he’d managed to smuggle through, or the facts he’d found out later, or worked out for himself. ‘Yes, please,’ he managed to whisper, through clenched teeth.

In fact, it didn’t hurt – not physically, anyway. Made sense, when he didn’t have a body to feel pain. But, mentally – aaaargghhh! He collapsed under the weight of memories suddenly thudding into his mind at once – the Escobar War, stuff from when he was a kid, stuff from being assigned to Admiral Vorrutyer the first time round, then trying to get used to life on the _General Vorkraft_ after that – all the bits of his life he’d ever had to delete because they were too much to deal with, all the times he’d had to go out of his body because of what was happening to it, plus all the bits just after those where people were yelling at him, ‘What were you thinking of, doing [whatever it was]?’ and he couldn’t tell them, because he didn’t know, either.

Except that now, he did, and it – made sense, sort of. When he’d finished gasping for breath (not sure why he needed to do that, when he didn’t have lungs any more), he looked back at the pile of memories, again, sifting out the bright, odd-shaped nuggets from the grey ashes. Rules were important, yes. Having a master to obey was important. But – when it was a choice between hurting a prisoner because the officer in front of him told him to, or protecting her because an honourable man wanted him to – or when it was a choice between letting a baby be killed because his liegelord and tradition demanded it, or protecting the baby for its mother’s sake – rules hadn’t been _the_ most important thing to him, he had to admit.

He looked from the god of chaos to the god of order and back. The grey god’s grey eyes smiled at him, solemn and kind and wise. He’d be a good master. But the white god’s red eyes shone with the fire of a burning palace, and they said, _I like you_. 

There had only been a handful of people in his whole life who even noticed him as a person, let alone liked him, and three of those had been in the same family. But, now, he could see that the white god understood him even more fully than Admiral Vorkosigan or Lady Vorkosigan did, and, even more than they did, accepted and loved him without being afraid or even surprised by anything he did.

‘Well?’ the two gods asked. ‘Are you ready to choose?’

For a moment, he wondered if he could strike a bargain – _White god, if I go with you, will you watch over my daughter and Lord Miles?_ But that was a stupid idea, he knew. For one thing, the white god would be slippery enough to wriggle out of any promise a man tried to hold him to. But he didn’t need to, anyway. This was the god of misfits – of girls who became soldiers, and boys who tricked their way into becoming admirals by pretending they already were, and, if it came to that, of washed-up alky jump-pilots, and deserters who got given a second chance, and hermaphrodite mercenaries who liked hamsters and quality tea. The Dendarii had found themselves a patron god, all right.

‘Yes,’ he said. ‘I’m ready.’

**Author's Note:**

> Author’s note: the line ‘all things counter, original, spare, strange’ comes from Gerard Manley Hopkin’s poem Pied Beauty. The story of Armsman Mandryka is a traditional Barrayaran legend which is published on AOOO as The Armsman’s Ghost by Zdenka.


End file.
